Without limiting the scope of the invention, its background is described in connection with measurement-driven path loss and crowdsourced studies on network performance.
Prior work has addressed some aspects of measurement-driven analysis and crowdsourcing: (i) measurement-driven path loss studies, and (ii) crowdsourced studies on network performance. For example, many works have used detailed measurements from a particular area and/or a particular piece of hardware [1]-[4] to create path loss models for specific region types (e.g., urban or suburban). The goals of these studies were to produce models that were independent of the exact physical location and broadly applicable to any environment. In other work, crowdsourced experiments have focused on collecting network performance data such as rates and traffic patterns to use realistic user profiles to accurately model performance. For instance, in [5], [6] performance data was collected about LIE and 802.11 networks from a few thousand users over the course of a couple months.